And there we go… sigh.
On the poker front I’ve found a cool new toy. Not that new actually, but before you had to pay for it and now it’s free! Poker Shortcuts is an application based on AutoHotKey stuff, and creates lots of keyboard shortcuts for poker sites like Full Tilt or Pokerstars.
My first thoughts about shortcuts is that I can’t be arsed, and I’m happy with the mouse. However I did want something that would open up tables a bit quicker for me – I’m now 6 tabling at NL5 and while it doesn’t take long to open up 6 tables, it could be quicker!
So I found out that Poker Shortcuts is now open source, which means free, which is nice. I downloaded it to try out, and it’s almost mindblowing in the way it changes the way you multitable.
Firstly it did help open up those tables – I still have to choose the table and click on the seat, but it does the rest (it sets my buy-in and clicks autopost blinds). However once playing then you really see the power.
The active table pops to the front as usual, but now it has a nice big red border so it unmistakable. My mouse cursor automatically appears over the fold button (took a bit of getting used to – I’d move towards the window and find I was actually moving away because the mouse had already moved there) – and since you’re folding 80% of the time that’s perfect. You just go click, click, click, ah, need to bet so slide slightly to the right.
It also sets the bet amount in depending on what your action is going to be, ie preflop it’ll set 3xbb + 1/limper for you, on later streets 75% of pot etc. This is a bit disconcerting and I’m not sure if I totally like it. Might be good though.
It clicks the time bank button for you automatically too – this has to be a life saver as I’ve missed several pots now where it timed out while I was busy on another table (chatting to someone with a female avatar who *must* be a hot chick right?).
Plus it can show M as a HUD variable. But I suck at tournaments so that’s useless.
There’s probably plenty more to discover, but for a first try it’s already impressed me. The only worry is that new Full Tilt updates will break it, but I think that’s the main reason it’s gone open source – it had become too much of a liability to charge people for the thing when it could so easily break. Hopefully there’ll be enough techy poker players out there to keep it up to date…
